Todd Finkelmeyer Plagiarism

In the postmodern society we have today, internet-access is a natural part of the everyday life. Not only have the Internet almost taken over people’s lives, but apparently also their schoolwork and education. Due to the easy access to everything on the Internet, faculty at schools have trouble find-ing a dividing line, between what is cheating and what is not. An example of this was seen in a chemistry-class at the University of Wisconsin, where 42 students were accused of plagiarism. While all the students protested, none of the students seemed to know the seriousness of the situa-tion. This leads to the question: when is something plagiarism? And what can one do to fix the cheating?

Journalist, Todd Finkelmeyer wrote the text “UW students,
His ethos increases, with both the use of statistics and experts to comment on the issue, for an example: “Donald McCabe, (…) has been researching academic misconduct for 20 years, and he says (…)”. Logos is also a penetrating form of appeal. It is used throughout the entire text, when Finkelmeyer tries to convince the reader that plagiarism is an increasing crime. Because, of course plagiarism is wrong, and he proves it by referring to the majorities opinion: “most seem to agree with the notion that plagiarism – taking the work of others and presenting it as your own – is wrong”. Another appeal to logos is his use of constatives in the text. Constatives make him look sure of his case, for an example when he uses “of course” in the end his contention: “Students who cheat are nothing new on college campuses, of
Either, they don’t realise how smart they are, or maybe they are just scared of hard work and failure? In reality, the main reason why students cheat is because they: “didn’t think they could accomplish what they wanted to any other way”. But is the goal really accomplished, when it is accomplished with fraud? Plagiarism is so common that some people even write papers in ex-change for money. As it is told in the article: “Professor Donald Downs (…) met a man who “told me he felt like he had taken my courses.” A puzzled Downs asked the man what he meant. “He told me, ‘I’ve written about 20 papers for your